Sometime in 2013, I walked into a used book store near my home in Philadelphia. It was a small place, and I was too lazy
to look around so I asked the owner if he had any books about cemeteries. His
reply surprised me. He said, “
Whenever I get a book about cemeteries, I put it
in the front window, because I know it will be sold within a week. Books about
cemeteries are very popular - for all the right and wrong reasons.”
Well, a purchase I made recently was for the right reason –
I didn’t have it! There’s a great, quirky used book store in Philly where I’ve
found a number of death-related books – it is a music and book store
at 2027 Sansom Street, called
Long in the Tooth. (I’ve actually thanked the
owners for putting all the death books in one place for me – I believe they
were amused.) About six months ago, I purchased from them a copy of
Silent
Cities (by Kenneth T. Jackson and Camilo Jose’ Vergara, 1989, Princeton
Architectural Press), a wonderfully written and printed large-format color
photographic cemetery book. Until I found it on their shelf, I never knew it existed.
Silent Cities (whose full name is Silent Cities – The
Evolution of the American Cemetery) now occupies a prominent spot among the
many cemetery books on my own book shelf. One thing I hadn’t expected to find inside
were color images of some very elusive monuments I had photographed a decade
ago! It solved a puzzle for me that I’d been wrestling with for quite some
time.
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| Image by Krista Baker, cemetery unknown |
Back in 2003, my friend Krista Baker and I made a mad,
one-day road trip through as many Brooklyn and Queens (New York) cemeteries as
we could. We covered about twenty miles of territory from Flatbush to Flushing,
basically following Route 278 (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) west. We didn’t
spend much time on the highway, though, using paper road maps (remember them?)
to navigate from one cemetery to the next through the densely populated
commercial and residential neighborhoods. It was a whirlwind tour, and I was shooting
film, basically looking for angel statues with which to create artistic,
high-contrast black and white images. Luckily, Krista was shooting digital, and
more competently documented our tour with her many wonderful color photographs
(the photos in this article are hers, with exceptions noted).
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| Image by Krista Baker, cemetery unknown |
I don’t remember much of the trip, and we did not actually
write down the names of our stops. In retrospect, this was unfortunate because
after I began posting cemetery images on Facebook, I had to ignore most of the
images we made on that day as I had no locations with which to identify the
statues and monuments! (This was before the advent of digital cameras that
could GPS-tag your images!) At the time, I did not even own a digital camera;
Krista’s various digitals were my initial foray into that world.
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| Image by Ed Snyder |
After driving from Philadelphia to Staten Island, we began
shooting in Brooklyn’s massive Green-Wood Cemetery (478 acres!) and ended at Flushing Cemetery,
in Queens, hitting no less than twenty Victorian graveyards along the way. Now
these were not small places – several were over a hundred acres! Needless to
say, we did not spent much more than an hour at any one stop. The locations of
some of the monuments and statues I photographed stuck in my mind, so I have
remembered their cemeteries through the years. Most of the locations in which
our hundreds of photographs were made, however, have faded from Krista’s and my
own memory.
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| Green-Wood's Gothic Entrance Arch |
For whatever reason, I recall the angel on the pedestal (above) being
at the entrance to The Evergreens Cemetery, at the border between Brooklyn and
Queens. The images of Green-Wood's Gothic arched entrance way were obvious,
though our photos of the statuary inside the cemetery are not so easily identified (which is
good, I suppose, since photography was not allowed inside in 2003!). I’ve been
able to pin down a few more of the image locations such as this view of
Manhattan (below) taken from Calvary Cemetery (Woodside section of Queens), the
location used in the film,
The Godfather, for the funeral of Don Corleone.
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| Calvary Cemetery, Queens, NY (Manhattan skyline in background) |
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| By Ed Snyder |
I
remember spending quite a bit of time photographing the statue of this crying
woman, whose hands hold a bouquet of artificial flowers. I posted it once on
Facebook and someone commented that its location is in St. John Cemetery
(Middle Village, Queens), permanent home of more actual
real mobsters than you can
shake a blackjack at, e.g. Lucky Luciano and John Gotti (click
link for full list of names).
When Krista and I visited all these places, we were mainly
looking for interesting statues and architecture. I don’t think it occurred to
either of us that there would be famous, or even infamous people buried in
them. In retrospect, it would have been interesting to see Dizzy Gillespie’s
grave in Flushing Cemetery or Charles Atlas’ grave at St. John in Queens. Even
where the presence of notables was obvious, I don’t recall us being drawn to
them. Brooklyn’s massive Green-Wood Cemetery, for instance, where framed
photographs of all the famous interred hang on the wall of the office (including
Leonard Bernstein and Basquiat, for instance), did not seem to rouse our
interest much. We were just enthralled with the sculptures in these magnificent
Victorian garden cemeteries.
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| Image by Krista Baker |
Certain things stick out in my memory, like the
mile-and-a-half stretch of cemetery clusters as you entered Queens near the
Broadway transit junction on Fulton Street. We hit most of these hillside
cemeteries, at one point watching a motorcycle funeral in Mt. Hope Cemetery
while we were on the other side of the Jackie Robinson Parkway in Mount Lebanon
Cemetery. We stopped for dinner in a Cuban sandwich shop somewhere in Glendale.
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| Image by Krista Baker |
There were two monuments that Krista and I
spent quite a bit of time photographing - apparently we both found them fascinating. One is
this marble sculpture (above) with life-sized figures of Father Time and a female human
mourner; the other was this granite monument (at right) to a person who seemed to be a hunter. Truly, two
of the most unusual and intricate memorials I have ever seen. The first,
heavily adorned with Victorian mourning symbolism, the latter, unusually
personal and a tad bizarre. I wanted to know more about them, but the problem
was, we had no idea where we had found them! Over the past few years, I posted photos
of them on Facebook with requests for info about their cemetery homes, but no
one ever responded.
Then, as luck would have it, in 2013 I found the book,
Silent
Cities. Many of the photographs in the book, oddly, were of the same monuments
Krista and I photographed in the New York boroughs! Even more oddly, the two we
found most fascinating were in there too! Turns out they are in the SAME
cemetery, Lutheran Cemetery in Queens. Finally, I had locations and names of this
and some of the other marvelous cemeteries we visited.
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| From the book, Silent Cities – The
Evolution of the American Cemetery |
The authors of
Silent Cities, Jackson and Vergara, tell us, “
The
overwhelming emphasis in American cemeteries is on hopeful images which exclude
death and decay.” On page 84, in the chapter, “
American Images of Death,” we find a
photograph of the very same white marble monument with Father Time with which Krista and I were so enthralled. It incorporates pretty much
every bit of mourning art symbolism of the Victorian era – Father Time (or is it the Grim Reaper?), a
designated female mourner with palm frond, broken column, the funerary urn, the
open book, and the “time flies” winged-hourglass! (Did I miss anything?!) The
book tells us it rests on the grave of a Mason in the Lutheran Cemetery in Queens.
I remember this place having lots of shade trees and being in a sort of
small-town residential location. Perhaps the trees have provided some shelter
from the acid rain - there appears to be very little weathering of the marble
sculptures. The monument may have also avoided vandals because of its high
pedestal.
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| From the book, Silent Cities |
On page 52 of
Silent Cities, in the chapter, “
German
Americans,” we find the image at left. It is easily one of the most remarkable cemetery memorials
I’ve yet seen. David Koebler (1848 – 1898) was a hunter, I assume. The monument
is large – a magnificently sculpted granite tree trunk with an anchor and
lilies (typical Victorian death symbolism), yet highly personalized with the
addition of the hunting symbolism. I’d love to know more about Koebler's story, the significance of the rabbit sitting on crossed shotguns, with marble hunting dogs above. One may assume that Mr. Koebler has indeed gone on to that Happy Hunting Ground.
As I look through the Silent Cities book, I realize that I
did not pay attention to most of the amazing non-angelic statues and
architecture in these wonderful cemeteries. How did we miss them? As I said
earlier, I was at the time shooting mainly angels, and unfortunately bypassed
many of these other wonderful cemetery statues and monuments – a mistake I
don’t plan to make again.
Please visit some of the cemeteries about which I’ve
written. Here are their websites:
